life, and all horrors had a subtle fascination for him. As
Henley had remarked, he possessed little sense of humour, but immense
sense of evil and tragedy and sorrow. He seldom found time to
calmly regard the drama of life from the front. He was always at the
stage-door, sending in his card, and requesting admittance behind the
scenes. What was on the surface only interested him in so far as
it indicated what was beneath, and in all mental matters his normal
procedure was that of the disguised detective. Stupid people disliked
him. Clever people distrusted him while they admired him. The mediocre
suggested that he was liable to go off his head, and the profound
predicted for him fame, tempered by suicide.

Most people considered him interesting, and a few were sincerely
attached to him. Among these last was Henley, who had been his friend
at Oxford, and had taken rooms in the same house with him in Smith's
Square, Westminster. Both the young men were journalists. Henley, who,
as he had acknowledged, possessed a keen sense of humour, and was not
so much ashamed of it as he ought to have been, wrote--very
occasionally--for _Punch_, and more often for _Fun_, was dramatic critic
of a lively society paper, and "did" the books--in a sarcastic vein--for
a very unmuzzled "weekly," that was libellous by profession and truthful
by oversight. Trenchard, on the other hand, wrote a good deal of very
condensed fiction, and generally placed it; contributed brilliant
fugitive articles to various papers and magazines, and was generally
spoken of by the inner circle of the craft as "a rising man," and a
man to be afraid of. Henley was full of common-sense, only moderately
introspective, facile, and vivacious. He might be trusted to tincture a
book with the popular element, and yet not to spoil it; for his literary
sense was keen, despite his jocular leaning toward the new humour. He
lacked imagination; but his descriptive powers were racy, and he knew
instinctively what was likely to take, and what would be caviare to the
general.

Trenchard, as he considered the proposition now made to him, realized
that Henley might supply much that he lacked in any book that was
written with a view to popular success. There could be no doubt of it.

"But we should quarrel inevitably and doggedly," he said at last. "If I
can not hold myself in, still less can I be held in. We should tear
one another in pieces. When I write, I feel that what I write m